She says: “Hope also feeds us. Not the hope of the foolish, but the other one”.

Guadalupe Mejía Delgado – El Salvador

She works for the Comité de Familiares de Víctimas de las Violaciones de Derechos Humanos de El Salvador Marianella Garcia Villas (Codefam).

She is a woman of the countryside, affable and sensible. Who could guess that behind her serene appearance there is a personal history of pain and loss? Defender of human rights for 22 years, her courage and determination have allowed her to open the doors of prisons and military barracks, achieving freedom for people who were opposed to the regime, during the Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992). 13 years after the signing of the peace agreement, she still works for justice and truth, asking, “Where are the missing people?” She is Guadalupe Mejía, an untiring seeker of peace.

Guadalupe Mejía is a rural woman, born and raised in the canton of La Ceiba, in the municipality of Las Vueltas, in the administrative district of Chalatenango, in the North of El Salvador. She married Justo Mejía, when she was barely 17 years old. With him, she found love, and their nine sons and daughters were born as a product of that love.
Justo was a farmer, politically and socially aware, who taught her a way of life that she would never abandon: to defend life in the midst of a poor and repressed society. When he was murdered in November of 1977, Guadalupe continued the fight that he had begun. “Justo is my conscience”, she would say.

Frail and unsophisticated as she was, from the moment of her loss, life was uncertain for herself and her children. In 1980, the civil war began and the repression grew more intense each day. In 1983, Guadalupe moved to the city of San Salvador to direct the Committee for the Freedom of Prisoners and Political “Missing” people (Codefam), which was born two years before that.

She went to prisons and military barracks with only a basic knowledge of the penal code. Nevertheless, she managed to rescue nearly 1500 people from the claws of the security forces who had always been skillful in making the people opposed to the regime “disappear”.

The war ended in 1992. Nowadays, she still works for Codefam (renamed as the “Marianella García Villas” Committee for the Family Members of Victims of Human Rights Violations of El Salvador). Now, as she did 22 years ago, she denounces the State and accuses it of hiding behind the veil of an amnesty law to evade answering the question that the families of the missing ones always ask: “Where are they?”

At age 60, she continues her work with a smile. “Peace will only be a reality on the day the truth is known, when violence has ended, and there is bread for everyone”.

Between 1980 and 1992, El Salvador went through a civil war during which the security forces, the military and Para-military forces, protected by the State, captured and made ‘disappear’ nearly 7000 people. An amnesty law left those crimes unpunished and impeded justice. (Read this on this page of 1000peacewomen).